This has been bugging me since the alpha of ARR. To start in the alpha, the sprites we saw then looked just like the elementals from 1.0, however they then changed to their current form we have now (like the elementals from FFXI, being a mass of elemental energy/aether). So why were they changed from the 1.0 elemental look to their current form?

And are there any distinctions on the differences of both elementals and sprites? I remember, if I do recall correctly, that there is a 1.0 elemental that appears during the WHM quest line for ARR.